Ed Baker's drive to change the world began early. In high
school in the 1960s, as a representative to an Episcopal youth convention,
he argued that all full members of the church should have a right to
vote - thus, lowering the voting age. Also, he persuaded his peers to
accept proposals to promote racial integration and equality for women
in the church.

"It was possibly one of the most dramatic political speeches
I ever gave," Baker recalls. In the context of his hometown of segregated
Madisonville, Kentucky, Baker says, his parents were "the town's liberal
intellectuals." Partly because his father was a quiet supporter of blacks
and the black community, "issues around segregation were the first things
I recognized as problems in this country," he notes.

Baker's early awareness of racism, and the example of
his father's involvement in righting injustices on a personal level
helped to shape Ed Baker's views on society and democracy today. In
his college years, he engaged in the Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam
War protests. More recently he demonstrated against the Gulf War and
applauded the efforts of last year's protesters during the World Trade
Organization meetings in Seattle. While his activism has waned somewhat
in favor of his scholarship and teaching career, he considers his writing
his "most overt form of political effort," and believes his work still
reflects the same notions of right and wrong that he learned as a youth.

"It's not like I'm constantly rebelling against all norms;
in many ways I'm very conventional and conservative, I think. It's just
that the norms that are relevant to write and think about, for me, are
norms that need to be challenged. The point of scholarship, if not education
generally, is to poke norms and prod them and critique them," he says.

Today Baker is a nationally known authority in constitutional
law and mass media policy, holding the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professorship
at the University of Pennsylvania Law School since 1982. In some ways,
he is a study in contrasts. From small town South, he now lives in Greenwich
Village in the nation's most populous city. A passionate proponent of
freedom of individual speech, he also believes that government ought
to regulate certain aspects of media and social policy. He is a prolific
author and teacher who took a mid-career break from academia to practice
with the American Civil Liberties Union. His soft-spoken mannerly speech
belies the weight of his words. Uniting all these aspects is the integrity
of one who practices what he preaches.

The quality of integrity is what Baker, who earned his
law degree at Yale in 1972, prized in his favorite professor there,
Thomas Emerson. "Emerson was [then] the country's foremost First Amendment
scholar," - not to mention one of its "leftist," Baker says - but more
important, "His intellect was fully in service of the values he believed
in. So many academics have good arguments but don't care about where
things go."

Yet Baker stops short of calling Emerson a mentor. "To
the extent I am following somebody on First Amendment scholarship,"
says Baker carefully, "Emerson is closer to my thinking than any other
scholar." Baker's own seminal contribution to First Amendment scholarship
is his book Human Liberty and Freedom of Speech (Oxford Press, 1989).